gigapixel

When Blaise Aguera y Arcas (then of Microsoft Research, but now at Google) demonstrated Photosynth at TED 2007, it became an immediate hit and has since become one of the most-watched and discussed tech demos of all time. While the original iteration of Photosynth was certainly cool, the new version — Photosynth 3D — will blow your mind.

NASA has produced a 1.3-billion-pixel, 360-degree photo of the surface of Mars, as seen by Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity. There’s a flat, panoramic version of the image (seen above and embedded below), or, my personal favorite, a cylindrical view (embedded below). The photo clearly shows such Martian celebrities as John Klein (the first drilling of an extraplanetary rock), Yellowknife Bay, and the Bird-Shaped Rock (a favorite of the conspiracy theorists).

Standard scanners might be a little boring, collecting dust next to your printer rarely getting use now that everyone with a phone has a decent digital camera, and most workplaces allow a PDF signature rather than a handwritten one. Instead of allowing that scanner to sit around hogging a valuable power brick outlet, a team of Japanese engineers turned it into a gigapixel holographic microscope.

What you see here is the core of the Milky Way, as seen by the European Space Agency’s VISTA telescope. If you looked up at the center of the Milky Way with your naked eye, all of these stars, galaxies and nebulae would occupy a patch of space that’s just a few square inches. This is the most detailed photo ever of the Milky Way, enabling ESO astronomers to catalog no less than 84 million stars.

The US Army’s newest Hummingbird drone can shoot 1.8 gigapixel images that, from 20,000 feet high, cover an area of 25 square miles. The drone uses image sensor technology from DARPA in order to do this.

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